The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
Cloud service providers may choose to segment pricing into granular categories (e.g., if a consumer creates a VM in a cloud environment), that user may be charged not only for the minutes/hours that the VM runs, but the provider may also charge for the amount of data transferred over the network to/from that VM. As such, a user should be able to take steps to conserve network bandwidth where and when the user deems necessary. Challenges may exist, however, in that current solutions typically rely on a manual shut-down of processes, applications, and/or VMs. Moreover, such approaches may require the user to manually re-enable the processes, applications, and/or VMs when the VM is later needed.